The basic search lets you search one or more censuses on the name,
household position, farm/house name, parish or county. The advanced
search lets you search on a combination of these, plus age and sex.

In your search results, click on a person's name
to see details such as sex, age, marital status, household position,
religion and place of birth. Click in the Farm/House column for that person to see a list
of everyone in the household.

The information from the census is in Icelandic, of course. I used
Google Translate to get a translation for household position terms.
That column seems to be roughly equivalent to US censuses' relationship to
the head of household (such as "wife," "child") or occupation (such
as "farmer," "maid").

If you do happen to have ancestors from Iceland, you'll find more
resources for researching them on our International
Genealogy Passport CD, which compiles helpful genealogy
websites, publications and organizations from nearly every nation on
earth.

Are
you researching (or hoping to research) the genealogy of your Tar Heel
State ancestors?

North Carolina is rich with vital records and other
resources to leaf out your family tree, but it also comes with some
genealogical challenges—early headright patents, the Granville District, a highly mobile
population, a shifting crazy quilt of counties and the fluid border
with Virginia.

Genealogy expert and Family Tree Magazine founding editor David A. Fryxell will present

Essential North Carolina history

Details on where to find vital, land, immigration and other records for the state

What ethnicity-based records your North Carolina ancestor may have left

The best websites and offline resources for North Carolina research

Attendees receive special access to view the webinar again as often as
they like, plus a PDF of the presentation slides for future reference.
And as a bonus, webinar
registrants will also get our North Carolina Research
Guide.

The George W. Bush
Presidential Library and Museum has launched a new website
hosted by Southern Methodist University, where the library
will be located. The site features highlights
from the library's collections, as well as online exhibits about President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.
You'll also get an early look at the still-under-construction
library and museum, scheduled to open in Spring 2013.

Princeton University has posted online the Sid Lapidus
'59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution, more
than 150 digitized pamphlets, books and prints from the American
Revolution era. They include Thomas Paine’s pamphlets “The Age of
Reason” and “Common Sense,” and John Adams’ essay "A defence of the
constitutions of government of the United States of America." Use
arrows to turn each document's pages like a book.

You can find Princeton's other digitized materials (which include
historical postcards and photos of the university—interesting if an
ancestor went there) in its digital
library, too.

Similar to US city directories, these Scottish directories contain
alphabetical lists of locations' inhabitants and information on
their profession and address.
By the mid-1800s, these directories covered all of Scotland, with
most being printed annually. The earliest ones were issued by
private publishers, but later, the Post Office took over publication
of directories in larger towns and cities. According to the website,

Most of the directories up until the mid-19th century would only
include the principal inhabitants of a location, leaving the poor in
particular unmentioned.
Women rarely featured in the lists, as usually only the head of a
household would be recorded.

In addition, people usually had to pay
a small fee to be recorded in the directories. While the gentry,
clergy, major tradesman, manufacturers, shop owners and other
professionals are likely listed, their employees or small traders
and craftsmen are often omitted. Laborers and servants are hardly
recorded at all.

There are exceptions, however—for example the
extensive lists of farmers for Perthshire or female householders for
Forfar.

Search or browse by last name, place or year. For names, only the
first three characters you enter will be used in your search (or
first five for names starting with Mc and first six for names starting with Mac).

My search for
mcint (the first five letters of McIntyre)
yielded 3,008 results, including the page above from the 1887-1888
directory
for Forfarshire, Angus County. Adding a place or year to my search
would have narrowed these results.

In honor of the Fourth of July, you're getting two free
opportunities to search for early American and Revolutionary War
ancestors on subscription genealogy websites (you'll need to set up a free account on each site to view records).

Say you needed someone, such as a friend or coworker, and you
couldn't find the person. What would you do? Probably start calling
his or her family, friends, neighbors, anyone you could think of.

Now what if you can't find great-grandma or great-great-grandpa?
Follow the same kind of approach: Check with your ancestor's FAN
club—that is, the friends, associates and neighbors with whom he or
she interacted.

This classic brick wall-busting strategy—also called "cluster" or
"collateral" research—is easier said than done. How do you find
out who your ancestor's FANs were, and how do you "talk" to them to find out what they can tell you about your family?

The Continental Congress voted July 2, 1776—more than a year after
the Revolutionary War broke out—to declare independence from Great
Britain. Thomas Jefferson was selected to compose a Declaration of Independence, which was ratified July 4
(that original manuscript has been lost). A copy was sent to
the printing shop of John Dunlap, who produced 200 broadsides
overnight.

Public readings took place across the Colonies starting
July 8 in Philadelphia. Most signatories signed the Declaration of
independence Aug. 2; this document is on
display at the National Archives in Washington, DC.
Whether your revolutionary relatives were Founding Fathers or
members of the Continental army—or, as was usually the case for
women, kept the home front warm—they helped forge
a new nation. Most
enlisted men were between ages 16 and 60, but younger and older men
also served.

On the other hand, maybe your family didn't think a split with
England was such a good idea and remained Loyalists,
or even fought with British or Hessian
troops. The British offered some African-American slaves—now called
Black Loyalists—freedom
in exchange for military service.

See these free FamilyTreeMagazine.com articles for advice and
resources to help you research your American Revolution genealogy.

The city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Historical Society have
teamed up to publish an online
database of LA city officials back to 1850. Click
Search Office Holder to search by name. To browse, click an election
year on the left, then click the tabs for elected officials,
committees and appointed officials, and expand the lists in each
category. If you have an ancestor who served as a public official in
LA, you might find it helpful to download the site's Introduction
and User Guide via the links on the left side of the page.

Added to the existing Ancestry.com indexes for Delaware, Maine, New
York, Nevada, Washington DC, this makes 10 searchable states plus DC
for Ancestry.com, and a total of 34 states plus DC across all 1940
census index websites (MyHeritage and FamilySearch with
its 1940 Community Census Project partners). The 1940 census is free
to search on all these sites.

I immediately searched the Ohio index for my grandmother, who I knew
was living with her sister somewhere in Cincinnati in 1940. Right
away I found her and a sister, living with the family of another
sister in a suburb just north of downtown.

This screenshot shows Ancestry.com's new image viewer (still in
beta). A window at the bottom shows transcribed information, and one on the right shows source details (you can make both of these windows disappear
by clicking the double arrows on the green tabs).

When you zoom in and
can no longer see the name column, the indexed names pop out from the left
side—with the person you searched on and his/her household
highlighted—so you can keep track of the rows of names. For several
columns, you can hover over a cell and the transcribed information
will pop up.

I've experienced a few minor glitches when moving around the record image using the new viewer on a Mac.